Civilization Means Power Used in Service to the Public

Civilization means that officials and authorities, whether uniformed or not, whether armed or not, are made to realize that they are servants and not masters. Thus wrote Winston Churchill in a 1936 article published in Collier’s, a then-popular American magazine....

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Civilization means that officials and authorities, whether uniformed or not, whether armed or not, are made to realize that they are servants and not masters.

Thus wrote Winston Churchill in a 1936 article published in Collier’s, a then-popular American magazine. He was writing about constitutions, the British and the American, and about constitutionalism in general, at a time when free governments were under severe and growing challenge by virulent new dictatorships in Germany, Russia, and Italy.

As he saw it, democracy occupies a middle ground, walking a balance that holds away from tyranny on the one side and anarchy on the other. Ideologues may see it as an excluded middle, but that is true only if life is reducible to a syllogism. In his rich genius, he knew better than the grim ideologues who relentlessly and methodically used power to make the lives of their citizens as barren abstractions. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: The Bible: Kill Before They Kill)

Tyrants always see anarchy in free societies and are offended by free institutions that clutter the simplicity of their conceptions with what to them is only meaningless debate and antiquated procedures.  In his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill quotes the first King James complaining about Parliament to the ambassador of the profoundly autocratic Kingdom of Spain:

The House of Commons is a body without a head. The Members give their opinions in a disorderly manner. At their meetings, nothing is heard but cries, shouts, and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence … I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.

Small wonder that the son of King James, feeling less of an obligation than his father to the status quo, got rid of Parliament for a decade, thereby propelling Britain towards civil war.

Skipping ahead a few centuries, Mussolini posed a stark duality between democratic talk and fascist action, and he truly delivered on his promise to make the trains run on time. (Taken Amtrak lately?)

To come home to America, we still look on the Sixties as the decade in which we took freedom to the extreme of cacophony, not just an unruly Parliament but seemingly a whole generation wildly off track. Interestingly, one of the strongest voices for freedom verging on chaos, Ken Kesey, was also an unromantic and severe critic of the excesses of the tripsters of those days. In an early Seventies interview, he criticized what he called “the communal lie”:

I remember delegates from two large communes stopping by once at my farm and negotiating in great tones of importance the trade of one crate of cantaloupes, which the southern commune had grown, for one portable shower, which the northern commune had ripped off of a junk yard. When this was over, they strutted around in an effluvium of “See? We’re self-supporting.”

A crate of melons and a ratty shower isn’t enough summer’s output for sixty-some people to get off behind. It was part of a lie that the entire psychedelic community, myself more than most, was participating in. When a bunch of people, in defense of their lifestyle, have to say, “Look how beautiful we were at Woodstock!” I can’t help but ask, “How was your cantaloupe crop this year?” Being beautiful, or cool, or hip is too often a clean-up for not pulling weeds.

So how can free people coordinate with each other without indulging in self-deception? Can we embrace the truth that is the pre-requisite to a workable life?

On the national level, the best method we’ve found has been constitutionalism. People choose to establish public coherence by foregoing the lies that deliver us only one box of cantaloupe and a broken stolen shower. We accept the difficulties of holding ourselves to a standard because we prefer the fruits of an abundant commonwealth to the ease of self-deception. We turn away from the fantasies sold to us by utopians to be true to the totality of what we have received so far, the intuition within and the examples without of those who provided us what we have needed to then take on our role of providers. We accept with gratitude the gifts of those who have sacrificed for us.  We embrace the reality of the larger self they modeled, the one that sees itself in the future, profoundly alive in all who adopt the ideal of service in personal and political life.

This larger self is the key to our personal development and to our national development. It is the awakening to a truth that is timeless even as it plays out in the history of our lives. It makes possible unselfish service, to our families, our communities, and our nation, the concentric circles of realization and commitment.

The dedication to truth brings us beyond the projection and exporting of blame to others, as, however blameworthy others may be, we only find the freedom to do better from within. There is the clarion call (the shofar blast) of Genesis’ declaration that we humans, both as individuals and as a group, are in the unified image of the One. The key to the good society and the key to the good personal life are the same thing.

Which brings us back to Churchill on civilized government.

When the Kesey’s communal lie rules, those wielding governmental power see themselves as comprehensively superior to those without power. Truth is only the truth of power, and this infects all their interactions. Worst of all, it infects language. They are sophists — the goal of communication is to persuade others, not to pursue truth together.

So, the statement “The laptop bears all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” was meant to conceal rather than to reveal the truth about the laptop, because the truth would have weakened the chances of these government officials to retain power. (READ MORE: As John Adams Knew, We Must Hold To Received Traditions)

But clever parsing is only the first step. Though such parsing is clearly deceptive, at least it contains the hypocrite’s implicit nod to truth; as Kesey once said, “At least hypocrites acknowledge that truth exists. Today, we don’t even bother to be hypocrites.” And so eventually, it devolves to straightforward lying.

Thus, Obama assured Alan Dershowitz in 2012 that he was going to be vigilant with Iran, as America expected. But Obama had no intention of being true , even by tortuous parsing, to the expectations he was deliberately cultivating. By 2015 Dershowitz was condemning the man he had supported for president, writing that Obama had betrayed “the promise he repeatedly made before he was re-elected: namely that ‘we are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons [so] rest assured, we will take no options off the table. We have been clear.’”

As in the case of poison gas in Syria, Obama spoke of “red lines” only for the effect the words would have in controlling popular support. When Assad crossed that line, nothing happened. Clearly, Obama felt that the public was to be controlled, not persuaded. Such a person is no longer a public servant; such a person is using the public to serve himself.

Churchill’s idea is rooted deeply in the constitutional tradition. John Selden, the 17^th-century constitutionalist, repeatedly identified abiding by agreements as “the universal first principle of every law and society” as Ofir Haivry put it. When language is subverted, no agreement is possible. Those who subvert language think agreement is unnecessary so long as they have power to act as they see fit. In the place of universal principles, divine law, to which all are accountable, such wielders of governmental power hold themselves answerable to no one and nothing.

Churchill might then say: You may have power, but you will no longer have civilization.

Civilization depends on using power to serve. We serve by speaking truth, abiding by our agreements, seeing ourselves in others, and so grounding patterns of reciprocal altruism in the core of our character.

Our character and our civilization are both at stake in our politics. We have seen the results of choosing power over character.

Let us choose faithful service instead.

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